After almost three years of monitoring by the Texas Education Agency, Austin ISD was released from TEA oversight on Feb. 17, 2026. The TEA created a conservator management team to oversee AISD’s special education program in September of 2023 after a mutli-year long investigation cited the program for 43 violations of state law. The district waited up to nine months to evaluate some students for learning disabilities when state law mandates that children be evaluated within 45 days of the request being filed.

Dr. Cherry Lee, Interim Assistant Superintendent of Special Education Programs and Health Services, explained that the reason AISD fell so far behind in evaluations was low staffing. In 2023, only 21 out of 72 evaluator positions were filled. 

“A significant amount of evaluators resigned, and those positions are difficult to fill,” Lee said. “And because we had so many vacancies, we weren’t able to maintain the number of requests that were coming in.”

According to Lee, the pandemic also played a role in AISD’s failure to evaluate students on time. Many elementary school students experienced gaps in their learning because online learning has been proven to lead students to struggle with early literacy. Additionally, parents were working more closely with their children on schoolwork and were thus able to notice patterns in their children’ s learning processes.

“COVID really impacted [evaluations] because many families were working with their children while learning was happening online and they may have discovered they were concerned about their child’s learning because they’re more closely working with their child,” Lee said. 

Junior Ada de la Garza is a member of McCallum’s Best Buddies club, which aims to foster community between special and general education students. De la Garza feels like the delay in evaluations had a negative impact on families and students alike.

“If you are a parent and your kid is struggling at school and you’re unsure why your kid is struggling and you’re not sure why your kid is having a hard time, the school is supposed to support and protect your kid,” de la Garza said. “By not providing adequate special education, they are not providing adequate protection and care for all of their students.”

De la Garza believes the delay in evaluations were violations of students’ rights.

“If the school is not providing adequate care, then they are essentially discriminating against a large portion of their student population, which is inherently wrong,” de la Garza said. “Everyone deserves to feel comfortable, understood and safe at school.” 

In order to fill the gaps in AISD’s special education programs, AISD and the TEA signed the TEA Agreed Order on Sept. 26, 2023. The order gave the district a list of 99 tasks to be completed, ranging from creating specialized student learning plans to holding thousands of student evaluations, and required that AISD meticulously track their progress on each task. To reach such a large goal, AISD superintendent Matias Segura said the district immediately made special education their “priority 1A” in a press release issued by AISD on Feb. 17.

“We mobilized every level of our entire district so AISD could be responsive and ultimately move towards this incredible achievement,” Segura said. “That immediate systemwide effort was the reason we were able to shift the conversation from a state mandated conservator to a partnership with the TEA monitors.”

Two years from September of 2023, when the TEA established a conservatorship over AISD, the district reached 100% compliance with the TEA’s regulations by December of 2025. Seguras attributed the district’s success to the efforts of everyone in the community.

“This has been a lot of work for us and getting here required a tremendous lift and collaboration with our Austin ISD community,” Segura said. “From families to staff to community partners, everyone had a role to play and every single person in our district answered the call.”

An essential part of meeting the TEA Agreed Order was catching up on evaluations. AISD held 10,000 evaluations and hired 250 evaluators and specialized education providers, temporarily partnering with special education contracting agencies. They also hired new positions to support students such as speech language pathologists, school psychologists, diagnosticians, and occupational therapists. Lee feels that the newly hired positions play a key role in education.

“Some students are going to need additional services to be able to learn,” Lee said. “Our role in public education is to make sure that we connect those services with students.”

To ensure students with disabilities received the resources they needed to learn, the district also focused on training teachers. In total, teachers and administrators completed 120,000 hours of professional learning. For Segura, all of the hours of training have added up to something greater.

“Every hour of training we have completed has been for one purpose: ensuring our students with disabilities achieve at the highest level,” Segura said.

Besides training teachers, the district also expanded its outreach to families. To comply with the TEA’s mandate, AISD created the Special Education Family Advisory Committee, held over 100 family sessions, and published a monthly newsletter with information about upcoming training opportunities for families.

“That could be everything from supporting your child with literacy at home to mental health, to transition services, to different agencies that can support your child as well as they move from high school and beyond,” Lee said. “We’ve really focused on providing family learning opportunities.”

The end of TEA oversight has a personal meaning for Lee. She has been involved in AISD ever since she entered kindergarten at Barton Hills Elementary School in 1979 and her whole family attended schools in the district–her father graduated from McCallum in 1968 and her children graduated from Bowie in 2015, 2018, and 2020.

“I have a lot of pride in this school district,” Lee said. “I received a wonderful education here and I want other students and other families that live in this community to have an excellent experience. More importantly, I want our students to feel prepared when they leave to reach any goals that they’ve made.”

While de la Garza feels relieved that AISD has improved its special education programs and been released from TEA oversight, she believes the school district still has a long way to go.

“I’m definitely really glad,” de la Garza said. “I feel like this is a huge step in the right direction, but I think there’s always more work to be done and more things they can do to help.”

Segura echoes de la Garza’s belief and claims that improving their special education programs will remain a priority of the district.

“While we celebrate this milestone, what’s most important is that we continue to meet the needs of all of our students,” Segura said. “We’re seeing strong evidence that we’re on the path to strong and sustainable gains for students with disabilities and remain committed to the work ahead.”